


and i hope i do not heal

by jordantodd



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Five Stages of Grief, Foyet Arc, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hurt Aaron Hotchner, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Murder, Sad Ending, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Whump, not kidding this is v depressing, please do not read this if it may trigger you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:54:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27570346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jordantodd/pseuds/jordantodd
Summary: [please do not read this if heavy discussion of suicide, suicidal thoughts and gore trigger you. your safety comes first!)foyet ties aaron into a knot he cannot undo. aaron sees no other way out.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 52





	and i hope i do not heal

**Author's Note:**

> also posted on my tumblr @jordantodds
> 
> if you haven’t already looked at the tags and trigger warnings please look again. your safety comes first
> 
> title is from “do not heal” by samia

_and i hope i do not heal, i hope you do not heal._

—= • =—

When did he become this?

He’s bleeding. The white fabric of his dress shirt is stiffening with blood, crimson. His fingers have been ripping at it for the past minute but he just can’t figure out how to get through, alleviate the pain. The patch of red on his abdomen is growing and growing still. 

Blood loss makes you dizzy, he knows this, but it’s like the air is solid and thick as he tries to move through it. The weight on his body now is more than that, though, he realises - Foyet’s figure looms overtop him.

The pain is agonising. More than he’s ever experienced before, and he’s been in a car when a bomb went off beneath his feet. Even then, he can’t help but be grateful for the subsequent hearing loss - if Foyet’s voice were any less muffled, he might just break. 

“Ah-ah-ah, Aaron,” he taunts, knocking Aaron’s hand away. He places his own down on the marred flesh, one finger on either side of the blade, and he pulls. 

He can feel the slickness of the metal against his flesh and it slides out, feel the blood rushing. His heart is racing, his body shakes under Foyet’s grip like a twanged string under a calloused finger.

How long has he been here? Is anyone looking for him? If they find him, will it be too late?

Then it goes quiet, save for the piercing ring in Aaron’s ears and the thumping of his heart. 

It’s a thick, heavy silence in the air and it’s choking him. Foyet is gone, the weight of his body lifted from Hotch’s own, leaving him to fumble oncemore through the shirt and press down, despite the agony, desperate to staunch the bleeding. 

When did he become this?

When he gets to the hospital, he’s still bleeding. It‘s lessened now but the pain lingers. Even more, the ache, the dull but steady pang on his chest that feels like the inside of him is rotting away, eating away at the tissue and bone. 

Recovery is never easy, and Aaron knows this. Years of broken bones mending and breaking over and over, bruises heal with time but there are some wounds that never really heal. He has washed away the blood, and the fingerprints - _his fingerprints-_ but this skin feels unclean, and unhappy and unwelcome on his frame. 

He misses his mom. 

A year passes, a painful year of stitches tearing and skin healing over and therapy and prescription meds to deal with it all. Things are not okay, they have not been and they will not be, but he pushes through the work and the pain even if it means he comes home to an empty house. 

Foyet comes back and he’s got his sights set on the woman Aaron’s crushed on since ninth grade and loved since eleventh and counting. He’s got his sights set and he’s not going to stop until one, or both, or all of them are dead. 

Haley gets shot. Aaron listens. Tears streaming down his cheeks and he’s on the brink of exploding. If Jack hadn’t been there, waiting desperately to be saved, perhaps he would have veered off the road then and there. 

He cradles Haley’s body like it’s the most sacred thing he’s ever held. She’s always been so vibrant, so full of life and bursting at the seams. Now, her skin is cold beneath his touch and he doesn’t know how to let go. It’s an unpleasant death - bullet through the brain, flesh and blood and brains scattered across the floor. Quick, the coroner tells him. She barely felt it.

Foyet is not the first man Aaron’s killed and he will be far from last. Everyone on the team is like this. It’s awful but it’s the way life works around here. This is different. This is up close, dionysian and untamed and brutal and bloody. So, so bloody. 

He can’t stop. There is adrenaline rushing through his veins and his hands are moving faster than he can think, just punching and punching. There’s a scuffle but Aaron manages to overpower him, and he’s punching to subdue Foyet, but at some point Foyet stops moving at all and he just can’t stop. He can’t, even though his hands are covered in red and Foyet’s face isn’t exactly a face anymore. 

_Classic overkill. Clearly personal. Rage-incited._

It is Morgan that pulls him away in the end, and Hotch completely collapses in his embrace. His face is bloodied and the ache grows stronger within him as each second passes. He cries, and so does Morgan, and everyone else in the room but no one can hide the abject horror Foyet’s _carcass_ instills in them, mangled and raw. 

When did he become this?

Foyet is gone, _good god,_ but so is Haley and so is Jack, in a way, and Aaron has never felt more like a sinner in saint’s clothing. No matter what he does, he can never wash away the blood on his hands. 

When Aaron is seventeen, he tries to kill himself. He’s seventeen and he’s angry, as most seventeen year olds are. He’s angry and his parents and his friends and the world and himself and he doesn’t know what to do; his dad tells him to man up and take it, but he doesn’t know how. He’s fresh out of boarding school with a full ride scholarship - Harvard, of course - and being back in this state, this city, this house, is all too much. 

He misses his mom. 

When Aaron is seventeen, eighteen in a week, his dad tries to kill himself. He succeeds. Michael Hotchner’s handgun is usually locked away in his office, in a drawer with the key hidden between two volumes of Chauncer in the shelf - which Aaron had never touched let alone read, when you’re sixteen you have bigger issues than middle age poets. 

That night, instead, it lay on the floor of his father’s study. Bullet through the brain, flesh and blood and brains scattered across the nice carpet. He could never quite get the stains out, no matter how hard he scrubbed. 

The coroner said it was a quick death, painless and over in an instant. He hadn’t asked, he didn’t want to know, and as he caught a glimpse of the violent, angry scars on his back that night, he almost hoped it wasn’t painless. 

Was that bad?

It’s safe to say he’s no stranger to suicide. 

The thought of it doesn’t exactly bother him anymore. He’s seen enough of it in his lifetime to have become numb to the sight, the ache in his chest when an unsub blows his own brains out more anger that they’ll never rot and suffer for their crimes than much else. 

Talking about suicide is something he avoids with the team. It’s an uncomfortable subject, for some more than others. JJ’s nails clench into her palms so hard she draws little red crescents into her skin, he makes a point to avoid the discussion. He doesn’t know how to tell her that he really does understand. 

To the team, Michael Hotchner was a loving and devoted, albeit strict, father who tragically passed away of heart failure. The truth feels too bitter. 

After Foyet, things go south and they go south fast. He’s been given two months to grieve. They originally only wanted him off the job for six weeks but Strauss is good at bargaining. 

Bargaining. Stage three of the five stages of grief, his therapist tells him. Seeking a way out, a remedy for the pain even if it’s convoluted at best. You have moved past this, she tells him, as if he’s a kid graduating from third grade to fourth and as if he should feel particularly accomplished. 

Stage four, depression. 

So that’s what it is. 

There’s this deep, resounding ache in him that doesn’t leave. It’s not.. painful. It doesn’t hurt, he doesn’t hurt. He’s just numb. Getting out of bed is getting harder and harder with each passing day and eating, showering, doing anything is even harder. 

Jess takes Jack for a few weeks. She’s grieving, too, of course she is, but she thinks Jack will appreciate seeing his grandparents. Aaron’s house is too empty, too cold. He feels awful about it but he knows it’s for the best. What kind of father is he if he can’t find the energy to make dinner for Jack? Hold him close when he has nightmares? Read him a story goodnight? 

He misses Haley. 

There are nights where things get dark. Darker, at least. When the evening creeps in and it’s just him and every sharp object in the house, he wishes he’d listened a little closer to Reid’s philosophical rambling. What comes after death, really?

Like his dad, Hotch keeps his guns locked in a drawer in the study, squeezes the key between two volumes of his old law books that Jack will never touch with a ten foot pole - he’s more interested in trucks and dinosaurs, at age 6, than criminal law. He takes them out every morning before going to work, and locks them away as soon as he arrives home, but this routine has escaped him now that he isn’t heading to work. 

He puts the gun in his mouth. Almost ceremoniously, tilting the barrel down against his tongue. Just to see what it felt like. Test the waters. The taste of gunmetal is cool and unfamiliar to him. He isn’t sure if he likes it, he’s less sure if he wants to know definitively. It feels at home on his tongue.

He considers his dad. Michael. Mike to his friends, Sir to him. His dad had been 40 when he bit the bullet - literally - Aaron was 17, Sean was 6. All he left behind was a broken boy and a corpse and a stain in the carpet that never washes out. 

He is 40. Jack is 6. At what point did he become more his father than himself?

Rossi shows up one night. He’s got a bottle of wine in one hand. It’s a bad night, most are these days. _Oh, Aaron,_ he says, like a father who’s just pressed a hand against his son’s flushed face and found a fever. 

Aaron excuses himself to the shower whilst Rossi fixes up dinner. He takes the free moment to make sure the gun is locked away, his journals are snugly tucked away, the medicine cabinet is neatly arranged. He knows Rossi is expecting the worst. 

It’s over a plate of spaghetti that Rossi asks how he is, _really,_ and Aaron wants to scream. He wants to throw a tantrum like he’s five again and bang his fists against the table and yell and blubber.

_There is a knot inside of me that I can’t untie,_ he wants to scream, _There are binds around my bones that keep me pinned to my bed each morning, there is something dark and dangerous inside of my veins and I need it out, please, get it out of me._

How can he explain that he’ll only be happy when he bleeds out? 

Maybe he shouldn’t have kept his eyes open when Foyet was stabbing him. He shouldn’t have fought the drowsiness, instead just digging his fingers deeper into the wound and just give in. 

_I’m okay, Dave._ He says instead. _As okay as I can be._

Dave leaves for the night, and Aaron finds himself sat on the kitchen floor. 

He plays coconut crack with a knife, a gun, a bottle of pills. It’s a game he learned on the playground at school and it’s one he taught Jack for when he can’t choose between a selection of storybooks. This, he figures, is not the games’ intended purpose. 

First to go is the gun. He empties the magazine of its cartridge, then pushes the two pieces away from him.

On the countertop, his phone buzzes. Then rings. He lets it go, holding his breath as the dial tone switches instead to Dave’s soft voice. 

_Hey, Aaron. I left my keys at yours so I’m heading back. I’ll be there in 30._

Second to go is the pills. Prescription painkillers from the stabbing, they’re just one of many medications he has to take to deal with the trauma. The scar tissue could be a problem in the future, the doctors warn him, but if you keep on routine then things should be okay. 

That leaves the knife. 

Aaron isn’t sure how long he’s been sat there, one leg curled beneath him and shirt sleeves rolled up. The tile beneath him is so uncomfortable but he can’t will himself to stand. He picks up the knife. 

He considers his dad, the gun, the carpet stains. And with a bitter laugh to himself, he figures that at least this is a stain they’ll be able to wash out. 

Red blooms beneath the blade as he drags it along his skin. It stings, of course it does, but he can’t will himself to stop even as he bites down on his lip to hold back a cry. There’s an artery here, somewhere, he tells himself, feeling like he’s digging for gold.

How long has he been here? Is anyone looking for him? If they find him, will it be too late?

The blood is dripping faster than he can clean it up, marring the edges of each wound until they completely disappear beneath the ocean of red. The sight makes him feel sick. It shouldn’t - he’s seen worse things in his time. But it does.

As he closes his eyes, he hears the front door open. 

  
  



End file.
